The Kashmir Shawl

For more than three decades, Rosie Thomas has enthralled readers around the world. Now, in The Kashmir Shawl, her most ambitious book yet, Thomas sweeps through time and place, and her readers will discover in this novel a captivating, romantic epic--an irresistible story of enduring love and memory.

It is the eve of 1941 and World War II is engulfing the globe. Newlywed Nerys Watkins leaves rural Britain to accompany her husband on a missionary posting to India, but when he leaves her in the exotic lakeside of Srinagar to take on a complicated mission elsewhere, she discovers a new world. Here, in the heart of Kashmir, the British dance, flirt, and gossip against the backdrop of war and Nerys soon becomes caught up in a dangerous liaison. By the time she is reunited with her husband, she is a very different woman. .

Years later, Nery’s granddaughter Mair Ellis clears out her dead father’s house and finds an exquisite shawl--a kaleidoscope of silvery blues and greens. Wrapped in the folds of this delicate object is a lock of a child’s curly hair. With nothing else to go on, Mair decides to trace her roots back to Kashmir, embarking on a quest that will change her own life forever. .

Submitted:Mar 5, 2013
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The Kashmir Shawl

By Rosie Thomas

Excerpt

They ducked through some narrow lanes to yet another in
an old wood and brick façade. Tall windows were designed to admit
the maximum amount of daylight for the workers within. Almost all
of the space in the small, silent room was taken up by three
wooden looms, primitive-looking affairs of beams and knotted
string. Three young men sat at the loom benches, intent on what
they were doing, but when Mehraan spoke to the nearest he sat
back and allowed them to see his work by unpinning the black
cloth that protected the shawl length. Laid out in a tidy row
across the breadth of it were hundreds of kani bobbins, each one
wound with a different shade of the hair-fine weft yarn. For each
row of the pattern, an intricate design of flowers on a black
ground, Mair understood that every one of the bobbins would have
to be taken up in order and passed between the warp threads. Each
time, the exact number of threads had to be counted before one
colour gave way to the next. The pattern-maker's instruc- tions
were written out on a rough grid pinned up in front of the
weaver, a tumble of scribbled digits that looked like the
mathematical calculations of an early astronomer. Next to this
was a sketch of the finished design.

Mair let out the breath she had been holding.

It must take fifteen minutes of concentration, she
calculated, to weave just one single row of the shawl.

Mehraan asked another question, and the weaver indicated
the amount of completed design. It measured less than half a
metre.

'Three months,' Mehraan translated.

To keep the finished price down, these designs consisted of two
broad bands of kani weaving on a plain ground. For an all-over
design like hers, Mair could hardly conceive of the amount of
work involved. She found that her eyes were stinging, partly in
sympathy with the young men who strained over this exacting
work all day, every day of their lives, and partly in awe of
the legacy that had somehow come into her possession. She felt
more than ever determined to pursue the shawl's history and
discover how it had come to be in her family.

Rosie Thomas is the author of numerous critically acclaimed,
bestselling novels. She has won the Romantic Novel of the Year
Award twice, for her novels Iris & Ruby and
Sunrise. Born in a small village in northern Wales,
Thomas discovered a love of traveling and mountaineering when her
children were grown. In the years since, she has climbed in the
Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car
rally, trekked in the footsteps of Shackleton on South Georgia
Island, and spent time on a tiny Bulgarian research station in
Antarctica. To research The Kashmir Shawl, she traveled
to Ladakh and Kashmir. Her website is www.rosiethomasauthor.com.